Parenting tips obtained from hunter-gatherers in Africa may be the key to bringing up more contented children, researchers have suggested. The idea is based on studies of communities such as the Kung of Botswana, where each child is cared of by many adults. Kung children as young as four will help to look after younger ones and "baby-wearing", in which infants are carried in slings is considered the norm.

According to Dr Nikhil Chaudhary, an evolutionary anthropologist at Cambridge University, these practices, known as alloparenting, could lead to less anxiety for children and parents.

Dr Annie Swanepoel, a child psychiatrist, believes that there are ways to incorporate them into western life. In Germany, one scheme has paired an old people's home with a nursery. The residents help to look after the children, an arrangement akin to alloparenting. Another measure could be encouraging friendships between children in different school years to mirror the unsupervised mixed-age playgroups in hunter-gatherer communities.

In a paper published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, researchers said that the western nuclear family was a recent invention which broke with evolutionary history. This abrupt shift to an "intensive mothering narrative", which suggests that mothers should manage child care alone, was likely to have been harmful. "Such narratives can lead to maternal exhaustion and have dangerous consequences," they wrote.

By contrast, in hunter-gatherer societies adults other than the parents can provide almost half of a child's care. One previous study looked at the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo. It found that infants had an average of 14 all parents a day by the time they were 18 weeks old and were passed between care givers eight times an hour.

Chaudhary said that parents now had less childcare support from family and social networks than during most of humans' evolutionary history, but introducing additional caregivers could reduce stress and maternal depression, which could have a "knock-on" benefit to child's wellbeing. An infant born to a hunter-gatherer society could have more than ten caregivers — this contrasts starkly to nursery setting in the UK where regulations call for a ratio of one carer to four children aged two to three.

While hunter-gatherer children learnt from observation and imitation in mixed-age playgroups, researchers said that western "instructive teaching", where pupils are asked to sit stil, may contribute to conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Chaudhary said that Britain should explore the possibility that older siblings helping their parents "might also enhance their own social development".